The Simple Way of Poison (18 page)

“I know,” I said. “It’s a grand thing, being in love. I suppose it’s quite impossible for you to see that somebody else is taking a worse beating.”

I was about to go on when there was a clatter at the door. Angie looked in, a sort of holy joy on his lean freckled face.

“Iris!” he shouted. “Where’s Iris?”

Then I heard him dashing up the stairs three at a time. Mac and I looked blankly at each other, and at Colonel Primrose, who came in alone, rubbing his hands together, a faint ironical smile on his face.

“What’s happened?” I demanded.

He looked at us queerly.

“Nothing for Angus to be quite so happy about,” he said drily. “As he’ll discover when he stops to think.”

“What is it?”

“It is Dr. Kavanaugh’s report on Senator McGilvray’s entrails,” he said deliberately. “It… rather changes things.”

“Then he wasn’t poisoned at all!”

I think we both blurted it out together.

Colonel Primrose shook his head.

“He was poisoned, all right. That’s not the point. He was poisoned in a rather novel way. They found two enteric capsules in his colon.—Dear, dear.”

He shook his head in some annoyance.

I looked at Mac, he looked at me.

“I don’t get the point,” I said.

“I didn’t either, till Kavanaugh explained it. He’s a consulting pharmacologist for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. We’ve been going on the assumption that potassium cyanide is a rapid acting poison, which it is… as soon as the body absorbs it. And that’s where the enteric capsules come in.”

I was still completely mystified. We waited patiently.

“An enteric capsule, my dear Mrs. Latham,” he went on slowly, “is a capsule with an enteric coating. And an enteric coating is an alkaline coating that won’t dissolve in the juices of the stomach. It doesn’t dissolve, in other words, until it gets into the colon. It’s the way they take the sting out of castor oil.”

“They never bothered when they used to give it to me,” Mac said.

“But they can. It’s also the way they give any medicine taken orally that they don’t want to act till it reaches the colon.—And the point here is simple, of course. You get a delayed action.”

He looked at us with a grim smile.

“So that when Lowell’s dog was given cyanide of potassium in enteric capsules, the absorption of the poison into the system was postponed… I wouldn’t know just how long, but very definitely.”

I tried to think.

“How does one get enteric capsules?” I asked. “I mean, do you just go to a drug store and buy them?”

He shook his head.

“No, but they can be made. Those that Senator McGilvray was poisoned with were made quite simply. A pellet of sweetened bread and cyanide dipped in a melted tablet of salol, which you can get from a drug store as easily as aspirin. It’s used for relief of pain from rheumatism quite commonly, and it melts at a very low heat—over a double boiler, for example.”

He took his old pipe that had been mended with a silver foot under the bowl, knocked the dottle out in the palm of his hand and tossed it into the fire.

“The only trouble with enteric capsules,” he went on at last—neither Mac nor I had spoken; my mind was slipping rapidly through the new and startling vistas this had opened— “is that they don’t always dissolve. They may be eliminated, in that case, or they may simply stay undissolved… depending on a number of conditions. That’s what happened with Senator McGilvray. When Kavanaugh opened him, he found three small pellets, about the size of orange pips. He examined them… and that’s how we learned about it. Somebody had fed the animal several of them—four at any rate—apparently in a piece of chocolate candy.”

The silence in the room for an instant was appalling. In my mind I could hear Iris’s husky voice: “I’m not going to tell you that I didn’t or that I did murder your father… but there’s one thing I will tell you—I did not poison your dog.”

“The point, however,” Colonel Primrose went on deliberately, “is not Senator McGilvray. Except of course as we have to consider all the people who could possibly have given him that candy.”

I liked Mac a lot, just then, for not saying what I’m sure he must have been thinking.

“The point is this: Randall Nash was not necessarily poisoned by the highball he was drinking here last night. We’d assumed that, because of the rapidity with which cyanide acts. But if those enteric capsules were tried out on the dog, and used again… then Randall may have taken that poison into his system at any time in the evening. Or, of course, at any place in the evening. From nine-thirty, say, when he visited his former wife’s house in Massachusetts Avenue, to twelve o’clock or so when he left A. J. at Linthicum Hall.”

I stared at him, comprehension gradually breaking in on my befogged brain. I think I could have wept. “—Then it doesn’t mean that Iris…?”

He shook his head.

“No person who was here that evening necessarily had any hand in it at all.”

I leaned back in my chair. Mac suddenly dropped his head in his hands. “Gee,” he said, “I…”

I felt just about as articulate. Colonel Primrose chuckled.

“Your alibi, incidentally-—if you’d got around to giving it, was O. K.”, he said, looking down at him. “Mr. Chatfield next door vouches that you waited in the car while Lowell went in to change her wrap.”

Mac glanced guiltily at me, his homely good-looking face flushing.

“Well,” he said stolidly, “it just goes to show you shouldn’t judge people by appearances.”

Colonel Primrose chuckled again. I suppose he was thinking, as I did, that it sounded more like one of Sergeant Buck’s moralistic gems than anything else. However, I’d noticed that most young men are very serious—more so at Mac’s age than at any other time in their lives, fortunately. It had always seemed to me a curious example of the mysterious workings of nature that Mac and Lowell should have picked each other out, one vitally needing a balance-wheel, the other the sharp spur of stimulus to urge him on. I knew A. J. had been worried about the spark to set him off for a long time. He tried practically everything, from jerking soda in a corner drug store to playing the saxophone at Ocean City, before he finished a very scattered college course and went into his uncle’s bank so he could marry Lowell. And that, I suppose, explained quite sufficiently A. J.’s desire for him to marry her… quite apart from her money. A. J. was much too upright a man to think of that very deeply, considering furthermore his own very ample means.

I was thinking of that when Angie came down.

Mac got up hastily. “I guess Lowell wouldn’t want to talk to anybody,” he said hopefully.

“How would she know what she wants?” Angie said cheerfully. “You know her, don’t you? Why don’t you go and talk to her anyway?”

Mac hesitated, and ambled out, indecision written all over him. We heard him go upstairs and call her name softly.

“My God, that guy’s a fiend for punishment,” Angie said. “But better him than us. How about a drink?”

“Just a minute, Angus. There’s a point I’d like to talk about with you.”

I don’t know whether it was the look in Colonel Primrose’s eyes, or the fact that he interrupted someone offering him a drink; but I do know that my heart tightened as if it had been dipped in a sudden astringent. And for the first time the meaning of what he had said about Angus having no reason to be quite as happy as he was occurred sharply to me.

His eyes were fixed quietly on Angie’s surprised face.

“You see, Angus,” he said imperturbably, “we now have to reconsider this whole business in the light of our new information. We’ve got to examine into everything that happened to your father from the time he left the house about twenty minutes past nine to the time he returned to it. If he was given the cyanide in the manner suggested by the examination of Senator McGilvray, then… several new possibilities are brought up.”

Angie sat down between us. He looked calmly at Colonel Primrose, his freckled face flushed slightly.

“I begin to… get your idea,” he said. “Go ahead.”

“First: it is almost unthinkable, in that case, that your father and the dog were poisoned by different people. Let’s take, therefore, the people who were in this house Christmas Eve. We have:

“Randall Nash himself.

Iris Nash.

Lowell Nash.

Mac.

Stephen Donaldson.

Angus Nash.

Mrs. Edith St. Martin.

The servants.”

“And me,” I said, being much too well up in crime fiction not to know that the person the detective fails to mention is invariably the guilty man.

“And Mrs. Latham.”

“And what about Lavinia Fawcett?” I added. “And remind me, by the way, to tell you something about her.”

He nodded.

“As far as I know the only people it leaves out whom he saw Tuesday evening are A. J. McClean, and Gilbert St. Martin—neither of whom, as far as we know, had any opportunity to feed the dog poison at any time Christmas Eve.”

I couldn’t help a little shudder of just plain physical revulsion.

“What an unpleasant lot you make us sound, Colonel Primrose,” I said.

“One of you is
damned
unpleasant,” he answered drily. “I’m trying to find out which it is… so he won’t do it again, sometime.”

Angus Nash spoke, slowly and carefully, his eyes steadily on Colonel Primrose, as if he wanted to say just exactly what he meant and no more or less.

“Several of those people, however, my father didn’t see after nine-thirty Tuesday night. Iris, for instance. So… while they could have poisoned the dog, they couldn’t have poisoned my father. Iris of course is quite out— she didn’t see him after dinner at all. I know that, because when he came over that night, I asked him if Iris had told him they were taking Mother to the hospital; he said then he hadn’t seen her since dinner. I’d phoned about eight o’clock.”

Colonel Primrose nodded, eyeing him rather oddly, I thought.

“It also lets Lowell out,” Angie went on coolly. “It lets Mac and Steve out, and Mrs. Latham. None of them saw him Tuesday evening… from dinner time to the time of his death after twelve. In fact, Colonel, it leaves just two people in—me, and Edith St. Martin. And that’s the idea, I guess.”

There was no sign in Colonel Primrose’s sparkling black parrot’s eyes. I looked at the two of them open-mouthed, I suppose; with a feeling of dreadful dismay, anyway.

“Well, you can come out with it, if it is. You don’t have to give it an enteric coating. I guess I can take it straight.”

Colonel Primrose smiled, with a sort of patient politeness. I could see his gaze, direct, unfaltering and probing, rest on the sandy-haired, freckle-faced young man by my side.

He nodded. “You see, of course, what line the police are likely to take, when they figure it out.”

“I see,” Angie said. “What’s my motive? Have you figured that out?”

Colonel Primrose nodded again. “Yes. There are two possible motives… at least. The first is, obviously, that you and your father didn’t get along.”

Angie smiled bitterly.

“If I’d been going to kill him for that, I could have done it any time in the last ten years.”

“You hadn’t the added incentive of protecting a woman— not until recently.”

“Meaning… what, Colonel Primrose?”

“I think you know what I mean, Angus,” Colonel Primrose said gently. “I don’t think you need to resent anyone’s seeing that you adore the ground your father’s second wife walks on.”

Angus’s face was quite white.

“Well,” he said “—what of it?”

He spoke with a controlled intensity more dangerous than a thousand of his sister’s violent tempests.

“Nothing,” Colonel Primrose said. “I’m merely pointing it out to you… before going on to the second motive.”

He hesitated a moment.

“—The motive that many people not knowing you—including the police, I’m afraid—will certainly think the stronger of the two.”

“And what’s that?”

Colonel Primrose looked at him quietly for an instant. He spoke then very slowly, and very gently.

“You knew your mother was seriously ill, didn’t you.”

Angie nodded.

“In fact, you knew she couldn’t last the night except for a miracle—which doesn’t happen often, even in these days. Is that true?”

“Yes. That’s true. She was running a temperature of a hundred and one when she went out. Nothing could stop her. I knew when she went to the hospital that night there was no chance for her.”

“And… you also knew the settlement that she and your father made when they were divorced—when your father was almost wiped out?”

Angie looked at him, puzzled. “You mean about her getting a third of the estate? Sure… but what of it?”

Colonel Primrose’s bushy grey brows raised slightly.

“If your father died before your mother, you would get one-third of his estate. If he died afterward, you would get nothing.”

“I don’t follow you,” Angie said quietly. “I never expected him to leave me a bean. I wouldn’t have taken it if he had.”

“Your mother had been ill for some time,” Colonel Primrose said evenly. “Last night she was mortally ill, which you knew. If your father died before she did, she got one-third of his estate, which would automatically go to you on her death. You are her sole heir. Lowell gets two thousand dollars and her mink coat. If, on the other hand, she predeceased Randall—”

“I get you,” Angie said shortly. He stared from one of us to the other, unseeing, and whistled. “Well, what do you know about that.”

Then he grinned unhappily at me. “And wouldn’t that have burned him up! Jeez, does that give me a laugh! Ha, ha!”

If the idea had ever occurred to him before, I thought when he gave that dreadfully mirthless burst of merriment, then Angie Nash was wasting his life. He should be telling lies for a living.

He looked at Colonel Primrose abruptly. “Then that’s why they’re so damned anxious about the time all this happened?”

“That’s why the executor is so damned anxious about it,” Colonel Primrose said coolly. “Precisely.”

“And wouldn’t that burn my little sister up.”

“I imagine it would. As Iris gets one-third of the estate, and any bequests have to be paid out of what’s left.”